Wednesday, 10 December 2014

I finally finished reading Les
Fleurs du Mal yesterday –
it's taken two months exactly, which feels like quite a long time for such
a small book. It's the first foreign language poetry I've read, and
some of it really is beautifully written. I've always thought French is
such a poetic-sounding language, and some of Baudelaire's lines are
lovely when read aloud.

The subject matter is pretty gloomy,
though, and having read the whole thing I got an overriding sense of
depression, and even hatred – hatred of women, beauty, happiness
and of himself as well. He seems to feel that none of those things
are what they seem on the surface, and that below they surface all is evil,
and death. (I guess I should have gathered that from the title...) That said, he uses some beautiful language to describe
horrible things, and has definitely expanded my vocabulary. Here's
part of the list of new words I've learned:

So at least that'll come
in handy when speaking to real live French people.